By Roger Allbee
By all accounts, immigrants are an essential part of our U.S. food system today. Every day, the food we eat likely passes through the hands of a guest worker, as they represent 21% of all workers in the U.S. food industry.
According to an April 2020 Report of the Migration Policy Institute on the essential role of immigrants in the U.S. Supply Chain, immigrants are essential workers in all parts of the food supply chain: agricultural workers, food processing, transportation, farm product wholesalers, grocery workers. In the food processing sector alone, immigrants account for 35% of meat processing workers, 34% of workers in commercial bakeries, 30% of the labor in fruit and vegetable processing, and 25% of workers in seafood and other food processing.
Some states like California, Colorado, Alaska in Seafood, and Nebraska in meat processing have a higher percentage of these workers. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “undocumented workers account for 67 percent of people harvesting fruit. They make up 61 percent of all employees on vegetable farms, and as many as half of all workers picking crops.” The Center for American Progress states that nearly 7 million undocumented workers labor in some part of the U.S. food supply chain today. Agriculture is said to have the largest percentage of undocumented labors in the labor force in the last three decades.
In Vermont these guest workers are important as well, both on some of our dairy farms, and with fruit and vegetable production. On dairies in the U.S. 80% of the U.S. milk supply is from farms that employ guest workers, and 50% of the labor is performed by immigrants. In Vermont it is estimated that as many as 1,000 migrants work in milking parlors and dairy barns. In the fruit and vegetable sectors, about 400 H2A federal visa program seasonal workers are employed annually. In all cases, these farms contend that they would not be able to operate without them.
The need of guest workers in food production and other sectors of our food system are not new, however. During World War 1 when migration from Europe declined, growers lobbied, and the first guest worker program was created during 1917-1921. During World War 2, a guest worker program was again established due to the lack of labor on the farm.
Today the lack of farmworkers is said to be one of the most pressing policy issues for agriculture. Due to the lack of labor, it is said that about 20% of agricultural products are unharvested nationwide impacting food availability and pricing. An article in Newsweek on March 12, 2024, America Has a Farming Crisis, states that “the United States lost 141,733 farms over the course of five years, in part due to a broken workforce system that has led to a worker shortage. In 2019, 56% of California farmers reported being unable to find all the workers they had needed over the previous five years, according to a survey conducted by the California Farm Bureau Federation.
There have been several attempts over the years to address immigration laws related to farm and food labor needs. As recently as 2022, farmers across the U.S. joined together to push for national immigration reform that they content would ease labor shortages and lower food prices, in the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. If it had been enacted, it provided a stable workforce by creating a path to citizenship for undocumented agricultural workers and it would have reformed the seasonal farmworker H2A farmworker visa program among other things.
Mass deportation has not been one of those recommendations in the past for farm workers due to its disruption of the U.S. food supply chain and the impact it would have on both food availability and food prices and disruption to the economy. In retail milk pricing alone, mass deportation of illegal immigrants could cause the retail price of milk to increase by 90 % according to a study by researchers at Texas A&M AgriLife Research Center for North American Studies. Others too have said that it would significantly disrupt the food supply chain decreasing food availability leading to significant consumer price increases. We know how important labor is to working farms in Vermont and the same is true throughout the country today.
The Author is the Former Vermont Secretary of Agriculture, Food and Markets.